The highly unpleasant reality of having someone paint your house

Having someone paint your portrait can be amusing, even delightful, but having someone paint your house, particularly if you’re living in it at the time, is about as much fun as eating an easel.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, this highly unpleasant, almost medically intrusive experience is not something you can permanently avoid, unless you buy a new house every five years or so.

As much as I argued against this unexciting and frankly foul-smelling way of spending large amounts of cash, it turns out that expert opinion is very much against me.

Apparently you should paint the outside of your home, particularly if it’s made of silly wood instead of sensible brick, every three to seven years, while the interior may need the same stinking treatment as often as every three to four years.

I fought against this logic, and against Google – which I’m sure is run by a secret cadre of millionaire house painters – for eight years. And, now that the whole thing is over, I really regret giving up so fast.

It’s not just the typical tradesman torture of having blokey-bantering pour into your house at 7am, seemingly in a race to be the first one to leave the toilet seat up. Nor is it even the fact that they expect you to converse with them at such ungodly hours, while attempting to get your kids ready for school in what now resembles a packed train platform.

No, it’s the paint. The smell of it, the feeling that you can’t touch anything, and the fact that you can’t half the time because they’ve covered every single one of your possessions in enough sheets to wrap a mummy the size of the Statue of Liberty.

And they’ve hidden the TV remote control, your mobile phone, keys and at least one of your shoes, just for a laugh.

Heaven forfend that you should work from home doing some unmanly form of non-labouring labour, because they will rib you about this endlessly, and stare at you through the window while you try to do it.

At the end of a long day of this weirdness, you will sink into bed at last and be unable to sleep, because of the fumes.

Yes, obviously, we asked whether it would be necessary to move out while the job was being done, but apparently there’s no need with modern, quick-drying, non-stinky paint technology. Yeah, right.

In terms of return on investment – which I personally like to measure in terms of joy (a scale on which a new electric guitar or a beer fridge ranks highly, but new socks or furniture rate slightly below zero) – painting your house has to be right down there with buying Bitcoin the day before it crashed, or purchasing expensive tickets to see Phil Collins, only to discover, too late, that he’s now too old and infirm to stand up, let alone play the drums.

At least with Bitcoin, you can watch your money disappearing down the drain but despite our house-painting nightmare costing roughly the same as a decent second-hand car, or a highly enjoyable holiday, I honestly can’t tell the difference.

On this point I must offer some important advice. First, you should paint everything a different colour, even a slightly different shade, just so you can see where your money’s gone. And if you fail to do so, do not mention to the person in your house who wanted the job done that you can’t see the difference.

This will go down like a lead paint can falling on your head.